


The Unbearable Weight of Silence

by TetrodotoxinB



Series: Bad Things Bingo 2018 [3]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s04e21 Makani 'Olu a Holo Malie (Fair Winds and Following Seas), Hurt/Comfort, I took some liberties with this, Injury, Refs to medical treatment, Square filled: kidnapping, Torture, Whump, danny pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 09:09:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14931371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetrodotoxinB/pseuds/TetrodotoxinB
Summary: Steve is in trouble and Danny can't do anything but watch.





	The Unbearable Weight of Silence

**Author's Note:**

> Bad Things Happen Bingo. Square filled: kidnapping. Unbeta'd.
> 
> (H50 contains a surprising amount of torture. You have been warned.)

The first call, when Cath lets him know it’s all gone to shit, Danny thinks the only things that have ever felt worse were when Grace was kidnapped and when his partner, Grace’s namesake, died in front of him. He’s watched torture and he’s been tortured, and now it’s gonna happen to Steve and there’s no way to get there fast enough to stop it.

Joe is quick on the draw, doing everything he can, pulling every string he can grab. Danny is grateful, but he still feels useless and impotent. Stuck on a tiny island in the middle of an ocean just to wait on other people to do his job — to save Steve. 

*

Danny watches the monitors, the screens split into little cells, each with its own feed. Twelve little squares show the dusty ground, the brown of little wattle and daub houses, the light green leaves of scrub brush in the fields just past the settlement. 

There’s no sound, but after so many raids of his own, Danny doesn’t need it to know. He watches and his minds fills in the details — how their boots thump against the ground, the sound of safeties clicking off, the heavy breathing that echoes in their helmets as the adrenaline ratchets up their respiration even though they haven’t been running, not yet. He watches, listening to the empty air, and waits for Steve to please, please, please show up in one of the little squares.

The room around him goes still and quiet, a collective held breath. All cameras are aimed at a door — either the front or the back. Schrodinger’s enemy hideout — until they open it Steve is alive and dead.

But the held breath doesn’t transfer across the video feed. There is no anxious waiting, no long moments of hesitation; it just feels that way to Danny.

The flashes of gunfire blind the cameras for a moment and suddenly the silence in the command tent is deafening because Danny’s can’t do anything and isn’t anywhere that matters. He should hear the chorus of multiple guns firing at once, he should feel the tiny reports in his chest, he should smell the spent gunpowder and the acrid tang of hot metal, he should be the one killing those bastards for taking Steve, for taking all those kids. But he’s not and he feels helpless, useless, and scared to death in a way that being in the line of fire has never felt.

“Package acquired.”

Danny does a double take, looking at the speaker as though it will repeat itself. But the people around him are already cheering and he’s still barely able to breathe. He focuses on the screen, looking for Steve, looking for anything he can find, and there he is. On the bottom row, second from the left, someone is kneeling over him and talking.

He strains his eyes to see more, to figure out just how bad it is, but the cell on the screen is tiny and the feed grainy. Steve, like everything else, is covered in dirt and Danny tries to make out what’s blood and what’s not, but the room is dimly lit and before he can tell for sure, the feed cuts off. 

The mission is over and command is packing it in. But Danny waits, watching the little red blip on the screen until it moves signalling that the helo is on its way back with Steve safely aboard. Then, Danny turns and quietly leaves the command room to go somewhere he can breathe. 

When the helo returns, the deep concussive beating of the rotors makes his chest shake and Danny rushes outside. The dust — and god it feels like it hasn’t rained here in a century or more for all the damn dust — chokes him and makes him squint, but he stays, waiting for Steve. 

The stretcher is the first out with four PJs carrying it. There are bandages, a splint, IVs. Danny rushes up and they stop for a moment. It’s a relief to know that Steve is stable enough to allow the brief pause in their rush to the infirmary, but the relief is short lived when Danny gets a closer look. 

Bruising covers most of his face. One eye is swollen shut entirely and the other is hardly better. Steve’s shirt has been cut off for EKG leads to be stuck to him and Danny can see boot prints, the tread so vivid on his skin that he could probably pick out the brand those bastards wore if he felt like doing the research. 

Before Danny can count the cuts, the finger prints on his jaw and neck, the probable broken ribs, and the fingers twisted out of place, the PJs hustle Steve away. Danny is left standing in the settling dust, shocked into silence, desperate for something that he can’t even name.

*

It’s later, once Steve is finally asleep thanks to sedatives, that Danny finally sees the video. Steve has just finished telling off the CIA officer, and Danny, while exasperated and worried, feels a little less like panicking. Steve is banged up but alive. So when the video cues up and Hassan begins yelling Danny rolls his eyes at the theatrics. Bolstered by Steve’s typical boneheadedness earlier, he even cheers quietly when Steve manages to get free and knock a few of them around. 

But even knowing how the video ends, he can’t quite pull off detached after they subdue him again, not when Steve is splayed out like that, not when his head is pulled back leaving his throat exposed. 

The machete that’s held up looks like it’s fifty years old. Worn, sharpened, resharpened, sharpened again until the metal was worn away and the blade deformed. Danny can’t help but wonder who else might have died on that blade, and he remembers all the children they saved, wonders how many more they didn’t. Then, he throws up into the trash can next to the bed. 

When he gets a hold of himself and rewinds the video, Danny notices something that he had missed.

Steve is crying.

Steve doesn’t cry, not really. Not for Doris the second time. Not for his dad. Not for himself. Not for anything, now that Danny thinks of it. 

The tears leave little lines in the blood and dirt that cover his skin, and Danny almost reaches up to wipe one away, but it’s just a computer screen and he’s hours and miles too late for it to matter. 

He glad then that he doesn’t watch it with the sound on the first time. It’s a trick that he learned at work. Break the work of watching someone else’s hell into parts. Section it, make it manageable. He’s not sure that the fear and pain on Steve’s face is something that he’s ready to hear just yet, maybe not ever.

But even so, it’s not like he didn’t expect it. He didn’t know how close they had cut it — all they told him was “down to the wire” — and Danny suddenly wishes he didn’t know after all. But he keeps watching.

The camera tips over then and boots obscure Danny’s view of Steve. There’s boots and bodies, but not what Danny wants. He watches anyway, desperate for a glimpse of Steve even though he’s asleep in the bed just a foot away. 

Danny watches the carnage, counts the bodies absently. There’s no real joy, no relief, no vengeful glee at watching Steve captors drop one by one. Danny’s done worse before. He’s pretty sure he’ll do it again. And he’s seen enough shootouts that it’s like static, background noise, to watching Steve’s ordeal. 

Finally, finally, the boots move and when they do Steve’s there, half under a table, curled up and shaking. He looks like a ragdoll — crumpled, discarded, forgotten. 

Steve throws his hands up in front of himself haphazardly like it will stop the hail of gunfire, like raised hands stop punches or machetes or death. His whole body trembles with adrenaline and fear, and Danny mashes the trackpad on the laptop, desperate to pause the video. 

He closes it and sets it aside, staring at Steve. Danny wants to close his eyes because the effort of keeping them open seems like more than he can handle. But he needs to see Steve, needs to watch the rise and fall of his chest, needs to know Steve is really here, that this isn’t a dream. But after only a few minutes the exhaustion becomes overwhelming. 

Without a second thought Danny pulls his chair right up next to the bed. Danny interlaces his fingers with Steve’s and even in a drug induced sleep Steve grips back. It helps, knowing he’s alive, knowing he’s still got that fight in him. But Danny has to worry because someone can only come back from torture unaffected so many times and Steve’s cheated the inevitable more times than anyone ought to be able to. 

But worry or not, Danny’s been up for twenty hours. He’s crossed two oceans — because when have flights ever taken the short way — and he’s been waiting, waiting, waiting for Steve in every moment. He’s exhausted, his brain shutting down even as he fights to stay awake. 

After nodding out and jerking his head back up painfully several times, Danny gives in. He lays his head on the bed next to Steve and closes his eyes. Grateful that, if nothing else, Steve is alive.


End file.
